Rants of a Fuzzy Curmudgeon

More evidence as to why Israel needs a two-party, winner-takes-all political system like ours instead of the coalition government of one-issue minor parties forced on them by adopting the English Parliamentary system.
Israel is — politically — extremely weak. I suspect that one of these days, in a crisis, the military will take over, more in sorrow than in anger of course, and that will be the end of the Knesset and civil government until a new Constitution is written that provides more stability and rids the country of the theocratic bullshit that impedes it (and encourages the rise of tiny religious parties, which are the absolute worst). The sad thing is that this is possibly the best thing that could happen to Israel right now, second only to a Government of National Unity with a mandate to govern until the crisis is past regardless of who resigns from it in a hissy fit. The Army is a wonderful tool, but when wielded by revolving-door governments, it’s not very useful at all. Armies depend on political stability behind them in order to do their jobs, and when they don’t get political stability, they don’t know what’s going to hit them next. This tends to engender sentiment for military coupmanship, with all that entails.
(Please don’t react to the above by telling me I’m not much of a Zionist because I don’t believe in Israel’s future — you’re right. I’m not a Zionist, and I don’t have much faith in Israel’s future. Judaism is time-based, not place-based. Jews don’t need the Temple Mount, or for that matter, any part of the Holy Land, to worship God. (And FWIW, “God” is not His Name, so I see no reason to use the “G-d” circumlocution in English, no matter how much of a Conservative Jew I am.) What Jews need is to wake up, smell the coffee, and quit letting themselves be led like sheep to the slaughter. That means they need to embrace things like gun ownership, military service in the countries in which they live (instead of military service in Israel), and a general “connectedness” with society instead of hiding behind religious laws and customs that were designed to minimize contact with the goyim.
Zionism to me is nothing more and nothing less a Great Escape from engagement with the rest of the world in the manner of those contact-minimizing laws and customs. Sure, let’s all run off to Israel and live in a state that is organized on Jewish principles, and ignore the rest of the world. It’ll make us easier to target next time.
I have friends who believe that making Aliyah is the most wonderful thing an American Jew can do. I guess if you like the idea of living in the middle of a war zone surrounded by 200 million kill-crazy Arabs, that makes a great deal of sense. But only in a very warped way.)

What do the people who died in the WTC, the Pentagon, and on Flight 93 have in common?
They can’t vote today. So I just did.
Down the Democrats. Up the Republicans.
Death to terrorists.

Democrats constantly play the race card. This makes them racists.
Democrats are against a sensible peacetime defense. This makes them warmongers.
Democrats are against a good, working intelligence service. This makes them supporters of terrorists.
Democrats want us personally disarmed. This means they want us to live in fear.
Democrats believe in welfare and social programs. This means they don’t find anything wrong with poverty.
Democrats have Al Gore, and worse, they let him talk to strangers. This means they aren’t serious.
If anyone has any more, feel free to contribute in the comments. I was just sitting here and these popped into mind as I was remembering why I plan to pull the Republican lever in the morning.

and Julia Carson is fighting for her political life in a squeaker against Brose McVey, so our lovely local Democrats are reverting to type and accusing the Republicans of racism.
To think I went to high school with our Mayor.

SBC-Yahoo! DSL has been down all morning, so the blog has also been down. (And I can’t work, either, which is even more irritating.)
I find it interesting that I didn’t have an hour’s downtime before SBC switched from Prodigy to Yahoo!, but ever since they did, I’ve been getting all kinds of downtime. Even little power glitches which should be meaningless (since I have everything UPS- and surge-protected) hose the router and necessitate a reboot.
Things are not happy here at One Man’s Vote. And SBC are going to hear about it, given that I pay the big bucks for commercial DSL.

Mark Levin over at NRO has a word up for Algore:

Obviously, Al, you have some unresolved issues. Let’s work through this together. Assume the lotus position, take a deep breath, and now begin chanting your personal mantra: “No controlling legal authority. No controlling legal authority. No controlling legal authority.”
Now that you’re relaxed, and your mind — such as it is — is clear, let’s begin. The Florida election was not in dispute. You just refused to accept the outcome. No matter how many recounts have been taken, Al, you lost. Now, repeat after me: “I, Al Gore, am a loser. I have the personality of porch furniture and the political skills of the Marx Brothers.”

Wonderful. So…Rachel Lucas-like 🙂

Posting here was kind of light today, but I was commenting over on Rachel’s blog.

And quite definitively, too. Go read it.

Take that, you scum-sucking Wahhabist terrorists.
We ought to do the same thing after we give them a fair trial and execute them.
Noted via LGF.

(Via The Professor)
I’m not convinced that selling vibrators in their health services dispensaries is really furthering a university’s academic mission.
I have nothing against a woman using a vibrator, mind you; that’s her business, and as the one student commented, “If people really want one, they can go online.”
Universities continue their slide into irrelevancy with this kind of idiocy.